Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: RAQUEL PEREIRA DE LIMA

BETWEEN REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING: SYMBOLIC MARKS OF VIOLENCE IN ANTONIO CARLOS VIANA

Short story. Violence. Memory. Antonio Carlos Viana. Brazilian literature.

Antonio Carlos Viana, the “João Cabral of the short story”, was a short story writer who has yet to be discovered by most people. Through his narratives, he built his own, unmistakable style. There is no way to separate the theme of violence from his stories, as well as memory as a resource to relive them. In his 40 years of production, the writer from Sergipe presented a portrait of the misfortunes that affect men in society regardless of their social status, age and gender. This work has the general objective of analyzing the construction of the memory of the violence experienced by the subjects in Antonio Carlos Viana's short story, seeking to understand the resignification of these memories, especially when they permeate the physical and psychological aspects of the characters. To achieve our objective, we take as a methodology the discussions raised by different authors on the theory of the short story, such as Armando Moreno (1987), Enrique Imbert (1979), Herman Lima (1952), Julio Cortázar (2008), Massaud Moisés (2012), Ricardo Piglia (2004); on violence, namely, Hannah Arendt (1985), Jaime Ginzburg (2012; 2017), Regis de Morais (1981), Yves Michaud (2006) and on memory, Jacques Le Goff (2013), Joël Candau (2021), Jeane Gagnebin (2009), Márcio Selgmann -Silva (2003), Paolo Rossi (2010), Paul Ricœur (2007), among other authors. Based on these readings, we can expand the analyzes carried out on the chosen stories, which were “Moonglight seranade”, from the book Cine privê (2009), “Cara de boneca” and “Três lembranças”, from Jeito de matar lagartas (2016), “Um barão assinalado”, from O meio do mundo (1993) and from O meio do mundo e outros contos (1999), “Reverendíssimo Padre Diretor”, from Aberto está o inferno (2004) and “Três revoltas” found in the collection organized by Regina Zilberman, Este seu Olhar (2006). As a talented writer endowed with aesthetic and narrative mastery, Antonio Carlos Viana created a narrative that managed to use economical and habitual language and syntactic organization, like a goldsmith of words, in favor of constructing a literary text that fulfills the role to question and bring to light universal situations typical of men in society, without being pamphleteer and empty, making us reflect on our role in the world and how it affects us on a daily basis.